From: Stéphane Ducasse <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Pharo-dev] poolDictionaries removal breaks my projects
Date: 2 Feb 2014 00:30:04 GMT+1
To: Pharo Development List <[email protected]>
Johan
YOU ARE RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT. I spent a significant amount of time
teaching Smalltalk to know that you are right.
And this change will be in the system :)
Just people that know something totally ignore what is it to learn something.
Imagine people are scared and close the debuggers. Oscar wrote patterns and I
always say the debugger is your best friend so do not close it.
Stef
>
>>> I don’t see how this change make Smalltalk (the language) simpler. For me
>>> this change looks more like an obfuscation than a simplification.
>>
>> How many lectures did you give? It is annoying to have to explain something
>> that usually people do not need to know.
>
> To complement this: in my own experience as a full-time prof, whenever you
> are teaching and at a given point you need to say: 'I cannot explain this
> yet' or resort to handwaving there is something wrong. Do I need to explain
> pooldictionaries to be able to talk about class creation? No, I should not
> need to do that.
>
> I get this feeling with Java all the time. First hello world example in Java
> is always a mess. public static void main(String[] args) OMG. Start to
> explain all that just to do a println? Were is the simplicity there? I don't
> want to have this kind of feeling when I explain Smalltalk.
>
>>> How should newcomers know how to enter pool dictionaries? I rarely use pool
>>> dictionaries and if I will need it I surely have forgotten about
>>> this change and expect irritation and frustration.
>>
>> Newcomers do not use pooldictionaries. In 10 years smalltalking I used them
>> twice.
>
> I agree with Stef that pooldictionaries are advanced features. I have been
> Smalltalking since 1998 and I have never used them.
>
>
> ---> Save our in-boxes! http://emailcharter.org <---
>
> Johan Fabry - http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry
> PLEIAD lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile
>
>
